Last Thursday, 24 February, I went to a meeting of the Dutch ArcGIS
user group (AGGN) at the ArcGIS offices in
Rotterdam.

I don’t know a whole lot about ArcGIS. I had a course on it at the
university somewhere in 1997 or so. And I’ve been doing some
programming on it for our “turtle”
product, which (on the technical level) is a whole bunch of scripts
that extend ArcGIS. (It is also a method of working with your data,
but I’ll leave that for now).

I do know a whole whopping lot about Python. Indirectly, I got an
invitation to tell something at that AGGN meeting about the Dutch
Python user group.

I thought it would be nice to look around at such a user group meeting
to get a better impression of the level of Python knowledge and the
way of working of ArcGIS users. I always like to have a better feel
for the audience for which I’m programming, it helps me to build
better programs. Attending such a user group meeting is a good way for
me to get a better feel.

So I joined a colleague who was also going. Actually, he was going to
do one of the two cases, as the idea was to get everyone behind a
computer and with the hands on the keyboard, typing actual Python
code! So he didn’t mind having an extra pair of eyes and an extra
brain full of Python knowledge at hand.

Some impressions:

The level of knowledge varies a lot. Some never wrote a single line
of Python, others are the Python expert at their company.

The level of interest varies a lot. Most were actively trying to get
something nice working. A few were just chatting. A few were very
enthousiastic and one pair even had a good Python book next to their
keyboard.

There’s a lot to learn. Python itself isn’t hard. Learning Python
while also learning the various ArcGIS library calls at the same
time is hard. There are often just too many unknowns at the same
time.

There’s a lot of power once you get to a basic level. So many things
you can automate. So many menial repetitive work you can prevent. I
mean, ArcGIS is very powerful and once you add a full-blown friendly
programming language (Python) to the mix... You can get a lot done.